I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
Freedom from likes and dislikes, the sudden sense of identification, the spirit of comedy.
Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living
If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.
The emotions – love, mirth, the heroic, wonder, tranquility, fear, anger, sorrow, disgust – are in the audience.
Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical?What if the ones inside can’t hear very well, would that change my question?
nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of musicnothing is accomplished by hearing a piece of musicnothing is accomplished by playing a piece of musicour ears are now in excellent condition.
Frost interviewing Noel Coward and Margaret Mead. Sir Noel’s view of life is Sir Noel. Mead’s mind is large and open, like Buckminster Fuller’s. She found thoughts dull that suggest that men are superior to animals or plants.
Remove God from the world of ideas. Remove government, politics from society. Keep sex, humor, utilities. Let private property go.
Power and profit structures’re out of cahoots with current technology. Aware of new inventions, corporations put them aside, waiting for competitive reasons until they’re obliged to use new gimmicks.
Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.
I haven’t been to a movie for three months of Sundays. I gather from what Carolyn reports that Hollywood now produces false entertainment: unmitigated violence on the screen; snickering, laughter in the audience.
Combine nursing homes with nursery schools. Bring very old and very young together: they interest one another.
If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.
Sleep’s what we need. It produces an emptiness in us into which sooner or later energies flow.
Veblen called it the price-system. Mills called it the Power Elite. It’s probably no more than ninety-nine people who don’t know what they are doing. They’re involved in high finance. Fascinating form of gambling.
So somebody has talent? So what? Dime a dozen. And we’re overpopulated. Actually we have more food than we have people and more art. We’ve gotten to the point of burning food. When will we begin to burn our art?
I discovered that those who seldom dwell on their emotions know better than anyone else just what an emotion is.
College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.
Theatre takes place all the time wherever one is and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case.
To accept whatever comes regardless of the consequences is to be unafraid.
An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.
To accept whatever comes regardless of the consequences is to be unafraid.
An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.
We are involved in a life that passes understanding: our highest business is our daily life.
It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
We are involved in a life that passes understanding and our highest business is our daily life.
There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.
I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.